Indeed, Feeney already has his eye on the next milestone: commercial space tourism. “We have an eight-person vehicle we want to fly late next year or early in 2006 – and 12 paying passengers might be even better.” Rutan, meanwhile, has designed a stretch version of SpaceShipOne that can accommodate six or more people.

6 (or more) person version of the SS1? Hmmm, can someone elaborate on this subject?

And what's with that 12 person Da Vinci vehicle? A dozen people carrying private spaceship? Seems little too optimistic. I think that mr Feeney should test its vehicle (with dummies preferably) in the air, before making such extraordinary claims.

Don't get me wrong. I wish best luck to Da Vinci team (and for all other teams in that matter), but as an engineer I know that there is no such thing as prototype working perfectly for the first time.

Stretched version of ss1 would indeed look very interesting.
I think the teams just need to focus on the main goal at hand before getting to carried away thinking about bigger and better crafts.
my 2 cents.............

SS1 at its sucessful flight June 21rst proved to work safely and good. The problems were due to share winds.

Sp the concept seems to be right and corrected and an íncreased version can be expected to work similar good and save. It will be much less expensive to be build - and especially much faster be ready to be launched. This will provide fast return on investment and large reductions of costs as Rutan himself stated in the media and the public.

Additionally the revenues to expect and the paylod capacity are forming a good basis for an orbital spacecraft which will require much more propellant reducing the payload capacity. Perhaps a 6-person-SS1 will be modular to allow partal substitution of payload capacity by propellant capacity.

Concerning propellant required to land please refer to disucussions under technology - there are some ideas about landing concepts requiring less or no propellant. And the fact that Scaled is planning on the orbit together with Bigelow is implying that they are working on landing and deceleration concepts already I think.